Monday, May 20, 2013

Fred: Kit came by Five Pines today and performed the songs from the current Turing Game. He gave us a live show after lunch and it went very well--except for the laughing. I did not anticipate the audience laughing during "Dancing Robot." So we brought Kit down to the machine vision lab and recorded him there too. These are posted below. We hired Kit and he will be playing more songs from X and Y. (Kit is our first new hire in four years. So Cole's no longer "the new guy.")

I asked Kit if he had any suspicions about which song was written by a
human and which by a machine. He said, "Yes." So I did warn him that
sometimes people come into the Imitation Game and try to sound like a
computer. (I believe the Loebner Prize has awarded these pranks in the
past.) However, I am concerned that Kit's suspicions may color his
performances. So he has agreed that we send him the songs without
indicating "X" or "Y" until after he performs them.

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Douglas Hofstadter﻿ is most famous for his wonderful book, Gödel Escher Bach﻿: An Eternal Golden Braid. He also collaborated with Dan Dennett to edit The Mind's I and wrote the Metamagical Themas column for Scientific American. In this characteristically engaging and playful lecture, he talks about the role of analogy in human cognition. This is just a little over one hour.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Alma: Hello everyone, this is your president, Alma. I have a couple announcements, including a call for a concert-slash-meeting on Monday.

If you haven't already heard, both players in Rose's Turing Game have submitted songs. That means FAC has written one of the songs. If you want to take a look, the texts for the songs are posted at the company site [X|Y]. Rose says she gave them a quick look, but she's waiting to hear them before reading them closely. She has asked us not talk with her about the songs until after the show.

So, we need to hire a musician to perform these songs. And we've lined up someone named Kit—he's a friend of Miguel's. We asked Kit to send a couple examples of him playing guitar and singing. Those are also posted at the company site.

On Monday at one o'clock, Kit will perform the songs for us. This will also be a meeting so we can vote on whether to hire Kit. Rose says both X and Y agree they will be writing more songs. So we'll be needing an in-house musician for the next several weeks.

Kit will be arriving here Monday Morning to get a tour of the place and set up. So don't be surprised if we stop by your office for a few. You might want to give us a quick tour of what you're working on. If you have any questions or have a problem with the meeting time, please send me a note and we'll talk.

Thank you everyone. And I'm looking forward to the show and vote on Monday.

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[Fred asked that Kit send us two songs with unusual chords—an original and one that everyone knows.]